Monday, March 01, 2010

Where Art Though Al? Hurricanes Fall from Gore's Grace

....Unfortunately for the hysterics, new peer-reviewed research published in Nature Geoscience concludes that hurricane strength has little to do with global warming:

Research by hurricane scientists may force the UN’s climate panel to reconsider its claims that greenhouse gas emissions have caused an increase in the number of tropical storms. …

However, the latest research, just published in Nature Geoscience, paints a very different picture.

It suggests that the rise in hurricane frequency since 1995 was just part of a natural cycle, and that several similar previous increases have been recorded, each followed by a decline.

In other words, the weather changes from year to year. That’s not to say that global warming of any kind — man-made or natural — won’t have some impact on storm activity. In fact, it will decrease tropical storms by a third (emphases mine):

Looking to the future, it also draws on computer modelling to predict that the most likely impact of global warming will be to decrease the frequency of tropical storms, by up to 34% by 2100.

What can we conclude from this? Climatology is a very inexact and developing science. Even the researchers agree on that much:

“We have come to substantially different conclusions from the IPCC,” said Chris Landsea, a lead scientist at the American government’s National Hurricane Center, who co-authored the report.

He added: ”There are a lot of legitimate concerns about climate change but, in my opinion, hurricanes are not among them. We are looking at a decrease in frequency and a small increase in severity.” Landsea said he regarded the use of hurricane icons on the cover of Gore’s book as “misleading”.